MEANDER - Maphead - page 117

the better of him, making token stops in countries just so he could cross them off. Now he
can't wait to go back and really see them: Bulgaria, Iran, Honduras, Tunisia. “There is no
finish line,” he says. It's not about completion anymore.
And highpointers know that their collection isn't about the climb so much as it is getting
off the beaten path. “It's a vehicle that takes you places you never would have thought
about going to,” Craig Noland says. “Have you ever been to Kenton, Oklahoma?” Oddly
enough, I haven't. He explains that it's the panhandle town nearest to Black Mesa, the
Sooner State's highest point. “You can go there and see dinosaur tracks and the country's
longest mesa. There's a three-state border that's changed places five different times. You
can see the wagon ruts from the old Santa Fe Trail. It's the only town in Oklahoma that's
in the Mountain Time Zone. You can spend the whole day there, in the middle of nowhere!
But you'd never say, 'Hey, let's go to Kenton and check it out.' “
I don't really have a list of my own, though I admire those who do. I respect finishers,
people whowon'tsettle fordoing most ofsomething. Ilike knowingthat tensofthousands
of compulsive travelers are crisscrossing the globe right now, elevating the most mundane
of human endeavors—getting from one place to another—into a kind of performance art.
As recently as a century ago, people who wanted to see the entire world knew that could
never happen, so they would sit with atlases and idly daydream of the places they saw
mapped there. In our age of casual travel, it surprises us to remember that no sitting U.S.
president ever left the country until 1906, when Teddy Roosevelt wanted to find out how
thePanamaCanalwascomingalong.Forthefirsttimeinhistory,jet-agetransportationhas
put essentially the entire Earth within the reach of these insatiable travelers. They can now
dispense with the atlas, having visited every single one of its pages. They've become the
atlas.
And in at least one case, they've literally become the territory as well. In 2002, Jack
Longacre, the founder of the Highpointers Club, learned that he had terminal cancer. “ I
want to be on the mountains,” he told friends as he prepared his will. “That's where I be-
long.” So he collected film canisters, labeled them with the names of the fifty states, and
distributed them to club members. When he died nine months later, they honored his last
wish by scattering his ashes on the United States Geographic Survey markers atop all fifty
high points, the peaks and the trailer parks, the mesas and the rest stops, every single one.
One final checklist.